About

FULL BLEED: The Comics & Culture Quarterly

$90,530

pledged of $50,000 goal

1,030

backers

FULL BLEED is a brand-new quarterly, hand-crafted PRINT-ONLY 200-page hardcover “magazine,” curated and edited by IDW Publishing’s Dirk Wood and Ted Adams. By merging the best in comics, fiction, non-fiction, deep dive interviews, opinion, history, think-pieces and more, FULL BLEED will be a reading experience like no other, and a beautiful artisan addition to any bookshelf. Looking through an international lens, but filtered through the unique perspective of the IDW:PDX satellite office in Portland Oregon, FULL BLEED will tackle all aspects of the creative culture, and beyond — comics, music, film, tv, fine art, photography, design, politics and more. FULL BLEED seeks total diversity: diversity in content, diversity in creator and contributor, diversity in genre. Every page turned will reveal a surprise.

Cover Art by Cassey Kuo

Here’s just some of what to expect in the first volume of FULL BLEED and beyond!

This Volume’s Centerpiece: A new in-depth interview with legendary author Stephen King, by IDW’s Chief Creative Officer, Chris Ryall. An interview like no other he has given, it begins with his childhood love of comics, and spins out from there...

Art by Sebastian Gomez

The Lost Alan Moore Interview: An unpublished and extensive interview with Alan Moore, originally conducted for Rolling Stone magazine by Gavin Edwards in 2006, with a new introduction.

A tribute to the late, great Bernie Wrightson by close friend and former editor Shawna Gore

A brand-new short story from award-winning novelist Joe Lansdale with spot illustrations from Tim Truman

Prose by Joe Lansdale, Art by Tim Truman

An interview with punk rock legend Carla Bozulich by Whitney Phaneuf

New comic strips from the creator of Too Much Coffee Man and Sh*t My President Says, Shannon Wheeler

A personal remembrance of Douglas Adams by Arvind Ethan David

From the article by Arvind Ethan David, Art by Robert Hack

“The Histories of Herodotus” - Historical musings, along with spot illustrations by acclaimed writer Mark Russell (The Flintstones/God is Disappointed in You)

A feature on the history of comics on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, by Calvin Reid, Publisher’s Weekly Senior Editor, and comics advocate

An autobiographical comic from the creator of Gumballs, Erin Nations

A Cuban travelogue from IDW's CEO & Publisher, Ted Adams

From the article by Ted Adams

A personal tale of whiskey, vinyl records, and Japan by Jarrett Melendez , with spot illustrations from Sara Richard

…and believe it or not, much more! This is only a taste of the staggering content that will fill the 200 pages of FULL BLEED.

STRETCH GOALS! Get ready for some fancy add-ons once we get the requisite number of subscribers. Stay tuned, as these will be revealed as we approach our goals!

As always, to find a local comic shop in your area that sells the finest of IDW books (and a few other publishers, too), visit the Comic Shop Locator Service:

https://comicshoplocator.com/Home/1/1/57/575

FULL BLEED is the premiere publication from IDW’s new imprint, WOODWORKS. After launch, IDW & WOODWORKS will be creating a campaign to help Traveling Stories, a charity dedicated to children’s literacy and “outsmarting poverty one book at a time,” and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, to help with their continued work for literacy and libraries. WOODWORKS intends to make smart books, for smart people…and do what they can to help make more smart people.

Please visit our friends at Traveling Stories, and the CBLDF, to learn more about their missions:

http://travelingstories.org

http://cbldf.org

Thanks to all of your support, FULL BLEED is destined to become a reality! But we're not stopping there... We want to find every person who likes to read that's left out there in the world! We want to get this thing to 75K, then 100K and beyond. To that end --->

We've got a TON of good stuff headed your way. Our plan was to announce these today, but I'm waiting on a detail or two to be confirmed before your minds are blown. But suffice to say, you may as well tell your friends, because once we hit 75, and 100.... You're all getting extra stuff! Word soon, and thanks again for all of your support!

We’ve got two weeks left to find as many subscribers as we can, so spread the word!

STRETCH GOAL #1 - Once we hit 75K, we’re adding spot varnish to the cover of FULL BLEED Vol. 1, to really give it that “pop feel!” This is inevitable, so expect that to happen soon.

STRETCH GOAL #2 - Once we hit 100K, everyone who has pledged $50.00 or more will receive a limited, autographed Sword of Ages print from Gabriel Rodriguez, infamous for his work on Locke & Key!

Thanks for all of your support, and let’s find some more subscribers! And if you’re in for Volume 1 only, round your pledge up to $50.00 even, and you’ll automatically be in for the autographed Gabriel Rodriguez print! More announcements for add-on items and fun stuff coming soon!

Here's the work in progress below on Gabe's print, which will be a retailer exclusive variant cover for his (amazing) new series, Sword of Ages! Discerning comic fans might recognize this tribute to Brian Bolland's work on Camelot 3000!

not final image

Hello everybody, and thanks for your support! As you may have noticed, we've blasted past 75K, so now FULL BLEED Vol. 1 will have some spot varnish on the cover, to really bring out the amazing cover art by Cassey Kuo... Now, there are 6 days to push for 100K, to unlock the Gabriel Rodriguez autographed prints!

A little over a decade ago, the terrific Gavin Edwards interviewed the legendary Alan Moore for Rolling Stone magazine...and it never ran. We're lucky enough to be running this "Lost interview" in FULL BLEED Vol. 1! Gavin has added a new introduction and context to this fascinating interview, which clocks in at nearly 10,000 words... Here's a little excerpt to stoke your interest....Along with a new spot illustration from the inimitable Peter Bagge!

Enjoy, this is just the tip of the iceberg! Tell your friends about FULL BLEED, still a few days left to subscribe!

GAVIN EDWARDS: Do you remember your first trip to London?

ALAN MOORE: I think so. It was in a hired mini-bus with my uncle and my parents and my cousins and my brother. It was in the very early '60s and there were milk bars everywhere, which we thought terribly exotic.

GE: I've heard of milk bars, but I've never seen one outside of A Clockwork Orange. Did they literally serve milk, or were they ice-cream shops?

AM: I'm not even sure. I think it was a kind of café with coffee, tea, and milk. It seems strange looking back now—they can't have served just milk. It was very bohemian in London in the '60s. I presume they just didn't serve alcohol and there was presumably a pretty fast trade in pep pills going on instead. I remember going to the London Zoo and finding that a bit unnerving—I didn't like seeing animals in cages—except when there was an elephant that evacuated its bowels all over one of its keepers spectacularly. I shall never forget that. That was when I was six or seven. I didn't go to London again until I was a teenager and starting to get involved with the early part of comics fandom. I could never live there—it's a bit of a nightmare—but it's a fascinating city. I still go down about once a month.

GE: You referred earlier to Promethea as an American comic book—do you think of your projects as having a national identity?

AM: Well, my relationship with America and American comics has changed quite a lot. When I started out, there was an English comics industry and there was this glittering, colorful American comics industry over the sea. I'd grown up reading the British comics but I'd also grown up reading a huge amount of American comics: they were in color and there were more of them. I was really excited when, in my mid-20s, I was brain-drained and I went to work for America. Since then, I've seen the English comics scene more or less atrophy because most of the big talents went overseas. I have a much more jaded image of the American comics industry now. In fact, at this point I would say that the mainstream American comics industry is the single thing that poses the biggest threat to the comics medium. The American comics industry thinks of creators as fuel cells that are to be used and then thrown away, which is done with every major creator that has ever graced its halls. It has grown up and made concessions only when it absolutely has to—and if it had the chance, it'd claw those concessions back. I have a huge number of friends in America and they are wonderful people, but America as an entity is the ugliest I've ever seen it. It's come to me to feel as if the policies of the comic-book industry are pretty much American foreign policy, but writ small. It's the same mixture of greed and deceit and gladhanding. I have started thinking that perhaps it would be good to distance myself from the big American companies because I don't want to end up like Hergé; I don't want to be remembered for having made a fantastic contribution to graphic literature but too bad he was a Nazi collaborator. I don't want to be a Vichy comics writer.

GE: Did you name America's Best Comics yourself?

AM: Yeah, just because it sounded corny and archetypal. I wanted something that sounded like it had been around since the '40s. They're a lot more knowing than something like Watchmen—there's an ironic distance in the storytelling.

GE: Was the motivation for doing those comics, like Tom Strong and Top 10, that you wanted to expiate for the imitators of Watchmen?

AM: Yes, I wanted to at least leave the American comics industry in the state that I found it, as you would any hotel room. With all this dark stuff, I felt that it had, through no fault of my own, had an influence on the mainstream industry that I didn't like. It seemed to have removed a lot of the joy and imagination that attracted me to comics in the first place in favor of a relentlessly dark, pessimistic sort of phony cynicism—a knee-jerk cynicism that I didn't think that the innocent characters of American comics had really been designed to carry. It was an experiment: I wanted to reinvest the mainstream with some of those elements that I felt had been thrown out with the bathwater back in the '80s.

Art by Peter Bagge

Risks and challenges

Why Kickstarter?

In days of yore, running a magazine, one had to rely on two important sources of revenue — advertising and subscriptions. Well, FULL BLEED is 100% ad free. To realistically sustain a publication of this magnitude, reaching out directly to fans is necessary. In other words, subscriptions. In this day and age, Kickstarter provides us the opportunity to interact with prospective readers, not compromise on quality, and remain free of advertising.

We want this project to get as much visibility as possible BEFORE launch, to arm ourselves with the information to make the best publication we possibly can. Kickstarter's community easily provides the best resource for that. IDW:PDX and Woodworks plan to be in business for years, generating content that can be sold anywhere under the sun. We want to build excitement for what we're launching here, and Kickstarter is the best place to spread that word far and wide to the people we want to reach -- you. Dedicated readers.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge US$ 25 or more
About US$ 25

Retailer Tier #1 - Full Bleed Vol. 1

Individual copies of Full Bleed Vol. 1

2 for the price of 1!

**To qualify, you must hold a Diamond account in good standing, and your order will be fulfilled by Diamond at a 2-for-1 rate! In other words, if you are a comic shop by placing this order for one copy, you receive two. Look for the other retailer tiers for other quantities. Or, please email Dirk Wood directly to find out how to adjust your pledge to get the exact quantity you need, with FULL BLEED and your account number in the subject line: dirk@idwpublishing.com -- Your shipping charges will be calculated by Diamond in your regular fashion along with your regular shipment.

We'll be asking for your Diamond account number when we send out the rewards survey at the end of the campaign, so we can track it and make sure you get your copies with your regular Diamond shipment.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge US$ 100 or more
About US$ 100

EARLY BIRD: Subscription, Eastman Print!

THE FIRST 50 People to PLEDGE $100.00 for Full One Year Subscription to FULL BLEED: The Comics & Culture Quarterly. Four 200-page prestige Hardcovers, with slipcase to hold all 4...Plus a limited, signed print by Kevin Eastman!

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge US$ 100 or more
About US$ 100

Retailer Tier #2 - One Year Subscription

Individual subscriptions of Full Bleed Vol. 1. Get all four volumes, along with a slipcase that ships with Vol. 4

Two Subscriptions for the price of one!

**To qualify, you must hold a Diamond account in good standing, and your order will be fulfilled by Diamond at a 2-for-1 rate! In other words, if you are a comic shop by placing this order for one subscription, you will receive two. Look for the other retailer tiers for other quantities. Or, please email Dirk Wood directly to find out how to adjust your pledge to get the exact quantity you need, with FULL BLEED and your account number in the subject line: dirk@idwpublishing.com -- Your shipping charges will be calculated by Diamond in your regular fashion along with your regular shipment.

We'll be asking for your Diamond account number when we send out the rewards survey at the end of the campaign, so we can track it and make sure you get your copies with your regular Diamond shipment.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge US$ 125 or more
About US$ 125

Subscription to Full Bleed with Print!

Full One Year Subscription to FULL BLEED: The Comics & Culture Quarterly. Four 200-page prestige Hardcovers, with slipcase to hold all 4. along with a signed limited print by Cover Artist Cassey Kuo, AND enamel “IDW:PDX” pin.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge US$ 125 or more
About US$ 125

Retailer Tier #3 - Multiple Copies

10 for the price of 5!

**To qualify, you must hold a Diamond account in good standing, and your order will be fulfilled by Diamond at a 2-for-1 rate! In other words, if you are a comic shop by placing this order for five copies, you receive ten.

Look for the other retailer tiers for other quantities. Or, please email Dirk Wood directly to find out how to adjust your pledge to get the exact quantity you need, with FULL BLEED and your account number in the subject line: dirk@idwpublishing.com -- Your shipping charges will be calculated by Diamond in your regular fashion along with your regular shipment.

We'll be asking for your Diamond account number when we send out the rewards survey at the end of the campaign, so we can track it and make sure you get your copies with your regular Diamond shipment.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge US$ 250 or more
About US$ 250

Retailer Tier #4 - Big Bundle

Individual copies of Full Bleed Vol. 1

20 copies for the price of 10!
**To qualify, you must hold a Diamond account in good standing, and your order will be fulfilled by Diamond at a 2-for-1 rate! In other words, if you are a comic shop by placing this order for ten copies, you receive twenty. Look for the other retailer tiers for other quantities. Or, please email Dirk Wood directly to find out how to adjust your pledge to get the exact quantity you need, with FULL BLEED and your account number in the subject line: dirk@idwpublishing.com -- Your shipping charges will be calculated by Diamond in your regular fashion along with your regular shipment.

We'll be asking for your Diamond account number when we send out the rewards survey at the end of the campaign, so we can track it and make sure you get your copies with your regular Diamond shipment.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge US$ 400 or more
About US$ 400

Signed & Numbered Subscription

Signed & Numbered Limited Versions of all four volumes of FULL BLEED: The Comics & Culture Quarterly, with slipcase, and signed limited prints for all 4. (Vol. 1 by Cassey Kuo, 2 - 4 signed by Artists TBD)

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge US$ 500 or more
About US$ 500

Kevin Eastman Original Art package!

Full One Year Subscription to FULL BLEED: The Comics & Culture Quarterly. Four 200-page prestige Hardcovers, with slipcase, and signed limited prints for all 4. (Vol. 1 by Cassey Kuo, 2-4 signed by Artists TBD) - Along with one piece of completely ORIGINAL ART by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle co-creator Kevin Eastman! AND enamel “IDW:PDX” pin. AND get your name in the next volume of FULL BLEED!

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge US$ 2,000 or more
About US$ 2,000

Kevin Eastman Interview Package!

Get to interview Kevin Eastman for FULL BLEED Vol. 2! Also includes $500.00 Pledge level: Signed & Numbered Limited Versions of all four volumes of FULL BLEED: The Comics & Culture Quarterly, with slipcase, and signed and limited prints for all 4. AND enamel “IDW:PDX” pin. AND get your name in the next volume of FULL BLEED! with slipcase, and signed limited prints for all 4. Along with one piece of completely ORIGINAL ART by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle co-creator Kevin Eastman!

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge US$ 3,000 or more
About US$ 3,000

IDW:PDX visit!

(U.S. entrant only) Get a trip to Portland, and spend the day working at the IDW:PDX offices on FULL BLEED Vol. 2! Also includes $500.00 Pledge level. Along with one piece of completely ORIGINAL ART by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle co-creator Kevin Eastman!

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge US$ 5,000 or more
About US$ 5,000

San Diego Comic-Con visit!

(U.S. entrant only) Get a trip to San Diego Comic-Con International 2018 for the official launch of FULL BLEED Vol. 3! Includes MVP access to all IDW related signings and panels! Also includes $500.00 Pledge level. Along with one piece of completely ORIGINAL ART by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle co-creator Kevin Eastman!

**please note SDCC badges will not ship with books in December, but would follow later.